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Sunday, 26 April 2015

Assassins Kill Their Parents

I
am not a big Superman fan. Don’t me
wrong, I don’t hate him and I will happily watch him in animation or a film,
but I am not heavily invested in the character.
I do have a friend who is and he was outraged by the ending of the film
Man of Steel where Superman kills Zod to prevent him from killing a group of
cornered bystanders. What made my friend
angry was that the writers put Superman in a position where he had to choose
between killing Zod and saving the innocents.

When
we consume media, it is easy to get caught up in the story and forget that
there is a storyteller making these characters say what they say and do as they
do. All stories are contrived. A good storyteller makes us forget that he is
there pulling everyone’s strings. A good
critic asks us to see the storyteller and ask what he is telling us beneath all
the distractions of character, setting, and plot.

What
the storytellers of Man of Steel seem to be saying is that under the right set
of circumstances even the best people will do something terrible. Superman fans will accept that message from
just about any character except Superman, who is meant to be an ideal.

A
question that bothered me for years, the kind of question you find yourself
pondering now and again while alone, is why the storytellers involved in the
Assassin’s Creed series made it so that most of the Assassins killed either
their parents or a parental figure. What
is it with killing their parents all the time?

Altair
kills Al Mualim, a father figure. Ezio gets
a pass on this one; however in his trilogy we see the animosity between Desmond
and his father. Connor kills his
father. Aveline kills her step-mother
and contributes to the events leading her mentor to kill himself. Edward, Adewale and Arno all get passes as
well, however there are family issues with Edward, who is disowned by his parents for becoming a pirate, and Arno, like
Ezio, has the murdered father issues times two as he lost both his father and
his foster father to murder.

My
first thought was that this was some kind of Freudian thing where a boy does
not become a man until he kills his father or his father dies. This may be the case, but it seems too
obvious an answer. It is also very
likely that the storytellers were just telling a story and the parent/child
conflict just makes for a good story.
They may not have even noticed the recurring theme of patricide in
Assassin’s Creed.

The
solution that I arrived at is quite simple.
You must kill your parents. No,
not literally. The parents are symbolic
of the invisible prison in which you live your life and no one can be truly
free until they destroy that prison. This
prison fashioned by your parents is what I often call “the program” and
sometimes “the matrix”.

Ever
wonder how the snake got into the Garden of Eden? I think that God put him there. He gave mankind free will but nothing to
choose between. So what’s the
point? The snake provided Adam and Eve with
an option that they had never considered and therefore an opportunity to
exercise their free will. In the end,
they chose Enlightenment over God and as a curse were forced to accept adult responsibilities.

As
children we only know what our gods, commonly known as Mom and Dad, have taught
us and the world they made for us. The entire framework of our minds,
both conscious and unconscious, comes from them. We learn by their lessons, their
examples, and the experiences they provide for both good and ill. Our parents
created us; our bio-electric computer brain was formed by them. So if you lash-out because of a chemical
imbalance, it’s because of them.
Sometimes our life choices are forced or determined by our gender,
that’s because of your father. So when
it comes to freedom, the power to exercise our free will, to what degree was
our lifetime of choices predetermined by our parents? Either through inherited biology or active nurturing.

The
Program

I find that the best metaphor for understanding our
psycho-emotional make-up, aka “the soul”, is the computer. A computer can
be said to have four parts: the hardware, the operating system software, the
factory pre-installed software, and then the personal software downloaded by
the user. Each of these is analogous to the elements of our
psycho-emotional make-up.

Hardware:This is the physical aspect which includes our electro-chemical brain
and how the body produces and responds to these chemicals.For example, changes in serotonin levels can alter
how someone perceives and responds to reality.In terms of study, this is represented by the fields of neurobiology and
psychiatry.When we speak of mind
altering drugs, we are talking about affecting the computer’s hardware.

Operating System: Are you a Mac or a PC? Each operating system is closely linked to
the hardware and determines how the computer functions. Likewise, humans have evolved certain
instinctive modes of behaviour as a species.
This is the field of evolutionary psychology. For the most part, people are largely unaware
of how our operating system affects our behaviour, but it accounts for a great
many of our natural drives.

In the age old debate of Nature
vs. Nurture, these are the Nature parts of the equation. The next level represents Nurture.

Factory Software: in a computer, these are the programs
pre-installed by the manufacturer. The
same holds true for the human computer.
The manufacturers in this case are the parents. The child may have inherited certain hardware
and OS aspects, but Factory Software refers mainly to what is called social
conditioning and takes place during the first roughly seven years of life. The agents of this conditioning are primarily
parents and siblings but later in the process friends, peers, teachers, and
mass media all come to play a role in framing how reality is perceived and
understood.

Social conditioning can be divided
in two phases. The first is the
unconscious phase. This is where an
infant absorbs things like language, dialect, and even facial expressions from
their parents. Although the child is
conscious, they are primarily acting on instinct since they are still
developing their cognitive abilities.
The second phase is the conscious phase where the child has the capacity
to interpret and process their experiences.
The child may respond either positively or negatively to their
conditioning. For example, if the parent
makes the child do chores the child may respond positively and accept a program
for a positive work ethic, or the child may respond negatively and accept a
program for a negative work ethic. It
all depends on how the child emotionally responds to the experience.

Despite the child being conscious
and cognitive, this period of life becomes largely forgotten. So as an adult a
person may have a set of pre-programmed responses to certain stimuli, but have
no idea how that program came into existence.
As a child, this person may have seen the colour orange just as he was
startled by a car backfiring. The result
is distaste for the colour orange lasting the remainder of his life even if
that event has been completely forgotten.

When you first get a computer or
laptop and first turn it on this is what you have: hardware, an operating
system, and factory software. You did
not design it and you have very little control of how it does what it
does. Likewise, your soul is as it is.
You had no say in how the electro-chemical brain of yours was designed and
wired and you had no control over how that brain was first programmed by the
agents of your social conditioning. What
you can control is how you choose to use the computer given what you have.

The final level is the Personal Programs. These are largely determined by personal
experiences and repeated patterns of behaviour.
We are what we repeatedly do. The
problem is that Nature and Nurture have already predetermined how we process
our new experiences, how we perceive reality, and the beliefs and values that drive
our actions. When a person says, “follow
your heart”, “trust your instincts”, “let your conscience be your guide”, or
“remain true to yourself” what they are really saying is to follow your
programming.

What haven’t you noticed
today?

Well, you don’t know because you
didn’t notice it. When Al Mualim asked
Altair if he regretted his life as an Assassin, Altair answered that he cannot
judge because he has known no other life.
He was raised to be an Assassin from infancy. This is a recurring theme throughout the
Assassin’s Creed series. Yes, we do see
adults join the Assassins, but there is a strong element of Assassin parents
raising their children to be Assassins.
As a result they know no other life except for the one chosen for them.

It is unclear to what degree Ezio's father prepared him for life as an Assassin. Edward Kenway simply arranged for young Haytham to receive combat training and encouraged independent thought to prepare his son (much to the frustration of Haytham's jealous half-sister, Jennifer)without ever revealing its true purpose. In the modern day, the Assassins went so far as to send their children to a commune called "the farm", which seems rather ominous, to indoctrinate them. But is it indoctrination or simply child rearing?

I once met a girl, who was
nineteen at the time, who had no idea what the religious significance of Easter
was. One of her parents was a Christian
and the other was an Atheist. They decided
not to force either belief on her and allow her to decide when she was old
enough. There are a few problems with
this tactic. First, if a parent believes
that a stove is hot, then they will prevent their child from touching it and
thus protect them from harm. If a parent
truly believes Christian doctrine, then they will raise their child accordingly
and thus save them from eternal hellfire.
Second, if a child is not socially conditioned (programed) to believe in
the supernatural, then they never will.
Their brains will not possess the wiring to allow it. By not choosing to raise the daughter as a Christian
they inadvertently chose to raise her as an Atheist. The contrary is also true, its is very
difficult for someone who was raised religious to ever truly abandon it. They
may swap religions easily enough, but few become Atheists without deep down
feelings that they made a mistake. No
matter how much our parents try to be unbiased they cannot help but make us.

The word kindergarten means “garden
of children”. It stems from a theory of
child rearing that believed that every child’s soul was like a seed that only
needed to be cared for and it would just grow into whatever it was meant to be. It is from this concept that we get the
expression “bad seed” to described someone just born bad. This theory runs contrary to what had been
the norm for most of human history.It was believed that a child’s mind came into the world as a blank slate to be
filled. Parents and social institution
were not so much raising children as taking
a pro-active role in programing them according to whatever they believed
to be right or best for the child. Today
we see this as wrong so instead we allow the child’s programming to occur by
accident rather than on purpose as if that relieves parents and institutions
from any responsibility for the outcome.

Just as Altair could not judge
between his life and one he had never known, neither can we conceive a life, lifestyle,
or state of being that we never experienced.
All we know is the life produced and fixed by our parents or parental
figures. Since all of our choices only
exist within this predetermined context, then we can never be truly free from
them. This psychological foundation will always be there.

Imagine two girls. One girl was raised (socially conditioned) by
her parents to have a very free and liberal view of sex. The other girl was raised in an environment
where open sexuality was frowned upon.
She decided to rebel and eventually got a job in the sex industry. On the surface, she was sexually free and
open, but deep in her unconscious was a sense of shame and guilt. Eventually she burned-out and left the
industry seeing it as a bad experience.
The other girl did the same, but felt no such guilt and when she left
the industry it was on a positive note.
The difference between these two girls is one acted consistently with
her program and the other did not.

This story illustrates that it is
not so easy to “kill your parents”. Simply rebelling against the program will not
do the job. Feelings like fear, guilt
and shame are the part of the anti-virus software designed to keep you in-line
with the program. The programming will be a part of you until your learn to
change it.

Sure, the theme of patricide in
Assassin’s Creed could be an accident.
However, if we look at the series as Existentialist mythology, then the
clear message is that we will never be truly free until we overcome our programming and its associate worldview and
learn to see what we haven’t noticed.

So how do we change the
program? Well, it could be argued that
all religion, psycho-therapy, hypno-therapy, and self-help is devoted to that
purpose and as a result there are countless points of view from thousands of
self-proclaimed experts. We all want
that magic pill to set us free to be who we choose to be or whoever we think
that we want to be or should be and there are plenty of salesmen ready to make
a living by selling it to us.

I do not know the answers, but the
lesson I take from Assassin’s Creed in this regard is that we are who we were programmed to be and we know no other way to be.
The idea of killing your parents is a metaphor for challenging our
preconceived notions concerning ourselves and the world as we experience
it. We may not be able to “kill” the
program, but by recognising it we can begin the process of transcending it.

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About This Collection

In April 2011, after playing Assassin's Creed Brotherhood for the umpteenth time, I wrote down some of the ideas that came to mind while playing the game. These became an article on my Evil Thoughts of a Decadent Mind page. This proved to be my most popular piece accounting for over half the hits on the site at about 54,000 views. Naturally when looking for an economically viable project the topic of Assassin's Creed seemed the most potentially successful. I wrote about five chapters and got stuck.

The Creed itself -- Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted -- proved to be, as Frederick Nietzsche described it, "labyrinthine". Rather than writing a critical analysis of the game series I found myself contemplating the Creed and its ramifications. In this I found another book topic, but I still wanted to write whatever came to mind about the ideas expressed in the game series. I decided that the best way to do this was to create a dedicated Assassin's Creed page. Especially since , with a new game being released each year, the book could never be truly finished.

As a video game, Assassin's Creed is judged primarily on its game play, but you won't find that here. No hints, no guides, and no discussion of combat mechanics. Another aspect of Assassin's Creed is story. Some folks love jumping off buildings but there is also the world or mythology of Assassin's Creed -- meaning the vast lore of the series. That plays a part, but you won't find the life story of Ezio Auditore or Edward Kenway here.

What you will find is another less talked about feature of games of this nature. There is story and stories have characters, settings, and plots, but also themes. The themes presented in narrative fiction dramatize the philosophy the creator is conveying, either with or without conscious intent.

You can call it the deeper or hidden meanings, but the truth is that it is just what I see in the games. They are my interpretations, which can be completely different from those laid out by the creative team in the offices of Ubisoft during late night meetings. Since "nothing is true" I accept on the outset that I could be wrong. That is for you to decide.

My focus here is real world philosophy applicable to real world living inspired by the themes found in the lore of Assassin's Creed. Hence the title -- Assassin's Creed: Inspirations.